Very useful information. I sincerely hope that others abide by these rules, or at least become actively aware of these staples while writing. I remember my earlier works on this site (haven't had the heart to take them down yet) that were overridden with flowery language, little action, and too much introspection. It's a hard lesson any budding writer faces, but I'm glad there are usable guides like these to help us a long. A writer never quits learning.

"I'm sure the villain would rather have a nap than a knife in the gut." LOL. / "On another note, make sure to have advantages believable. For example, if the hero is fighting a desert elf in a desert, don't have the elf get lost and confused. Have the hero get lost and confused. It's okay. He can take one loss." ROFL.

Thank you for putting this quick guide up! I've had problems with battle descriptions (… yeah, yeah, you're distinguishing action and description but IMO action essentially is description since you put a scene into words… oh well :/ ) but now it actually seems pretty easy. Definitely helpful, even if the things you point out about characters etc. is something most experienced writers know. Perhaps, if you want to make the list complete, you could include how to make a villain believable. There's loads of hyper-powerful villains out there that only wish to destroy the world for no reason… They live on the world, for God's sake. Ah, whatever.

If I may still give you a few tips… first off, pay attention to the tense. When giving your example, you switched tenses. An art in itself in such a short paragraph It might work if you have the "present of excitement" ( if you write in 1st person, you write the whole battle paragraph in present tense despite the rest of the story being in past tense just because it whirls up so much emotion/excitement/whatever. There's a word for this but right now I only remember the Latin expression -_-)

Also… I'm not sure about the example you gave. You might have to distinguish between what's worthy to be written and what's not. The sweat drop, to me, seemed to have no function whatsoever to the paragraph, making it a pain to read regarding text flow. Not wanting to flame or anything! Just personal preference or something. I always try to keep stuff short, and for me it works, but well... it's just my opinion, so you can choose to ignore me.

Regarding battle scenes in general, this is a nice little guide, and something I'll probably use as reference when writing future battles for fanfiction. Cheers and I'll get to reading around some of your other work!

Love it! this should really help. Although the only story I have up is on has only two fight scenes (working on getting more!), this should probably help me in the future with other fight scenes.

I just adore making my goody-goody character lose. That's like the best thing since sliced bread. She thinks she's on the top of the world then... She's knocked off her feet, battered, beat up, et cetera, until someone with a little more smarts and a little more experience has to drag her sorry rear out of the situation.

I have been guilty of gore overuse/killing too much (pokes Cast No Shadow fanfic) but with mostly a good reason behind it.

chocolatemilk2 chapter 1 . 9/30/2011

Hey, I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time out of your day to write this guide.

Just to make it better though, you might want to work on your tensing. Tensing is when the story is happening according to the narrator- there's past, future and present tense. An example I can give you is 'he walked', 'he will walk' and 'he walks'.

The main thing about tensing is you have to keep it consistent, otherwise the reader can becomes confused as to what's currently happening in a story. So lend-off sentences with bad tensing isn't the best idea.

Your worst offendor- "I drew the iron sword from my black scabbard, drawing a laugh from Haes. He plucked two daggers from his belt as a single sweat droplet falls horribly slow from my brow. Before the drop hits the ground, I spring on Haes, blade darting at his pointed ear. He swung a knife up, successfully blocking the fatal blow. A slash from his other dagger sends me dancing out of-reach." can be easily fixed.

Merely change 'falls' to 'fell', the first 'spring' to 'sprung', 'sends' to 'sent'. You see? It's the smallest words that can make a difference overall.

Thanks for helping .

Kyre Crow chapter 1 . 5/14/2011

Yay, I've found another how to write an action story. I suck at writing action. One thing I noticed about this is that when you give examples, you start with "I drew my sword," or whatever. This is past tense, but then you say "I swing it," which is present tense. That's been bugging me. You might want to mention how to write it a bit more, but otherwise it's good. I like this, and am going to use it when I write action in the future.

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huimei chapter 1 . 5/30/2010

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